OCZ Vertex 3 SandForce SF-2000 Based SSD Preview

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Introduction and Specifications

Just last week, we gave you a glimpse of what OCZ has in store for the enterprise SSD market with our preview of the Vertex 3 Pro. Without giving away all of the juicy details, the Vertex 3 Pro essentially buried the competition and offered performance that was significantly better than any current-gen solid state drive. As we mentioned though, the Vertex 3 Pro is an enterprise-class drive, and as such, it sports a price tag outside of the realm of your typical PC enthusiast. OCZ did hint that the “non-Pro” version of the Vertex 3 was coming soon, however, and stated that it would be priced “significantly lower”.

Well, here we are, just one week later and we’ve already got a beta Vertex 3 in hand for some initial testing. As you’ll see in the specifications below, the upcoming Vertex 3 looks equally as impressive as the Vertex 3 Pro in terms of if features and expected performance, but what’s more exciting is that it’ll be price more in-line with current SSDs. Take a look...

OCZ Vertex 3 Solid State Drive

Specifications & Features

Performance Specifications

Max Read: 550 MB/s

Max Write: 525 MB/s

4KB Random Write (aligned): Up to 60,000 IOPS

*Achieved on Intel Sandy Bridge platform which is recommended to show full potential of the drive

Despite the similar naming convention, the OCZ Vertex 3 is a completely different drive than the Vertex 3 Pro. The two have different controllers, different NAND flash memory, PCBs, and the more mainstream Vertex 3 lacks the “super-cap” that makes the Pro drive more suitable to mission-critical, enterprise applications.

The OCZ Vertex 3 drive you see pictured here is a 240GB model (224MB formatted) outfitted with 16 pieces of Micron NAND flash, totally 256GB—the additional capacity is over provisioned for wear leveling, data protection, and other functions. The controller on the drive is the SandForce SF-2281, and differs from the 2582 on the Pro edition in a few ways. The SF-2582 controller offers a few more features not available on the SF-2281, like additional flash support (eMLC and SLC specifically), SMART features, higher MTBF on the controller, better unrecoverable bit error read (UBER) rating, as well as adding the power loss data protection feature which is augmented by the super-cap.

In terms of its specifications though, the new Vertex 3 is very impressive. It has a SATA III interface with max reads of 550MB/s and writes up to 525MB/s, with up to 60K IOPs.